From Canada to Alaska to Siberia, an immense half-crescent of the Arctic is on fire. The hot spots along this zone include freakish fires with 50 mile fronts, fires that generate thunderstorms from the heat of their updrafts, and fires that paint smokescapes over the lake waters of Canada even as they light the sky red:

(Freakish lake fire burns in Saskatchewan, Canada on Monday, July 13. It’s just one of thousands of fires now raging through Arctic lands and 5,105 fires burning through Canada alone.)

Fires, overall, that have been vastly under-reported in the mainstream media. And, even when they are reported, they include often inaccurate qualifiers.

So what the heck is really going on? The human hothouse is generating an ever-greater burning potential throughout the Arctic. One that has erupted toward new levels of intensity this year. One that is plainly and painfully visible to any who care to look.

* * * * *

In Alaska, a massive area the size of one and one half Connecticuts (7,300 square miles) has already been consumed by fires. A zone of smoldering tundra, boreal forests turned to ash, smoking bogs, and smoldering, thawing permafrost.

But aside from a handful of responsible sources (see also here), the mainstream media just can’t get what is now likely to be the worst fire season ever to strike Alaska right. So let’s take a few moments to set the record straight on what is an unprecedented burning of Alaska’s warming tundra, forests and permafrost. A burning that is related to human greenhouse gas emissions-based heating of the atmosphere in that the thawing permafrost provides additional understory and methane fuels to fires even as it multiplies the number of fire-igniting lightning strikes.

A Failure to Accurately Report on an Ongoing Disaster Directly Linked to Humanity’s Greenhouse Gas Emissions

At first, a sudden, abnormal outbreak of hundreds of wildfires throughout the Arctic state during June was framed ‘not abnormal.’ That is until June shattered all previous records for worst wildfires ever and put all notions that anything normal was going on soundly to bed.

Next, the narrative ran on the false meme that most of the fires were caused by human hands (of the match tossing variety). Any journalist worth their salt, however, could simply check that pseudo factoid against the Alaska Interagency Coordination Center report to find that 377 fires were lightning-caused (well more than half) and that these lightning-caused fires, as of Tuesday, amounted to a whopping 4,675,000 acres burned. The human match, lighter, and campfire ignited fires? A piddly 30,000 acres. In other words, more than 99 percent of all the area burned was due to a warming-intensified proliferation of thunderstorm activity and related lightning strikes.

(Pyrocumulus clouds have been popping up like hothouse amplifying daisies all over Alaska since mid June. This ridge fire appears to be in the process of building its own thunderstorm. Image source: ADN.)

Indirectly, we could certainly call this extra lightning human-caused — as the vehicle of greenhouse gas warming has resulted in a marked increase in lightning strikes to the thawing permafrost and heating forest and tundra fuels. But this particular human cause is certainly not of the typical match-throwing, arsonist variety. It’s another story entirely. A much more important story that far too many sources appear to be (unintentionally or deliberately) missing. A story of the plainly visible and worsening impacts of human-forced climate change.

To use any set of language other than to characterize the Alaska burning as unprecedented, freakish, record, and abnormal is vastly irresponsible. Any attempt to attribute the 4,675,000 acres ignited by warming induced lightning strikes to ‘arson’ is equally myopic and misleading. If you’re reading a source that makes these claims, that source is an invalid and untrustworthy reporting medium. One that can’t keep a handle on even the most basic of facts.

(Hundreds mile long smoke plumes issuing from Wildfires in Alaska on July 14. Image source: LANCE-MODIS)

In the July 14 MODIS satellite shot we can clearly see massive smoke plumes billowing up from the still energetically burning fires in Central Alaska. Lightning laden cumulonimbus clouds ride overhead — a pattern refreshed by a continuous influx of warm storm moisture rising up over the Gulf of Alaska and deflected off the ridiculously resilient ridge (RRR) to the south. The storms are still setting off around 3-7 fires each day. A rate of new ignition that, though slower than June, is pushing total number of Alaska fires toward the unprecedented 700 line.

When combined with the Alaska fires, the total area now burned in Arctic sections of North America now equals about 12.1 million acres or more than 1 million acres burned since this time last week. Rates of burning for Canada are, like Alaska, in many cases unprecedented. Total acres burned for the Arctic nation are now at two times the five year average and three times the 25 year average. Specific regions, like British Columbia, are seeing as much as 10 to 20 times the typical area burned by mid July.

Vast Wildfire Eruption in Eastern Siberia

Moving on across the rapidly thinning ice of the Beaufort, Chukchi and East Siberian seas, we find that Eastern Siberia is also experiencing a massive wildfire outbreak. Reports from Russia on acres burned have tended to be spotty. But this zone near Lake Baikal has seen a persistent and then an expanding propagation of burn zones toward the north and east since April.

Today, the fire outbreak there could best be described as vast. Stretching from Lake Baikal to the Sea of Okhotsk, the fire zone now encompasses a region more than 1,000 miles across. Scores of large fires can be seen burning beneath a massive cloud of smoke that streams all the way down through China, combining with the nasty coal dust cloud stooping over that fossil fuel victimized state.

One cluster of these fires, visible in the upper left of the image frame above and zoomed in below features fires with fronts in excess of 50 miles long. These are truly immense fires. Individual blazes large enough to consume small states burning through the carbon rich boreal forests and permafrost zones:

(Immense fires with fronts as long as 50 miles from end to end ballooned in Siberia today. Image source: LANCE-MODIS).

For reference, the above image’s lower frame edge covers more than 250 miles. This gives us a sense of the utterly huge fires burning away from lower right to center frame.

The massive outbreaks of fires in Canada, Alaska and Eastern Siberia during 2015 are not occurring in a vacuum. They are not isolated disasters to simply report, confuse, forget, and then report again when the new record fires erupt in 2016, 2017, 2018 or 2019. They are instead symptoms of a larger trend of polar amplification in the Arctic.

The more than 1,400 billion tons of carbon in the permafrost is now being set to rapidly thaw. The permafrost, when unlocked from its primordial, thousands to millions year old, ice traps yields this carbon in solid, liquid, or gaseous form. The solid peats, the liquid organic carbons, and the methane seeps all provide new and highly volatile fuels for wildfires.

In addition, boreal forests are not fire resilient like their more southerly cousins. The trees there do not typically face flame or intense ignition sources. So when an atmosphere heated by human fossil fuel burning produces powerful, lightning flinging thunderstorms in the Arctic for the first time in thousands to millions of years, the trees there have no natural defense against the fires that inevitably ignite. Individual trees may as well be standing sticks of dynamite in the face of this warmth-driven barrage.

Other factors include tree killing pest invasions, the thin mat of flammable material that underlies most Arctic forests, and the drying tendency of the added heat itself.

59 Comments

Wharf Rat

wili

Fast and relevant reporting on vital news not often found elsewhere.
A good example of why I check RS before I check any other outlet.
Many thanks.
Protect your typing digits, and thx for keeping the droll trolls at bay.
DT

– Here’s an emblematic fire weather photo from 2013. The California ‘Rim’ fire.
You can see smoke from the wildfire at midlevel, fire evaporated moisture laden clouds above — and the culture that produces our current firestorm weather.

MELBOURNE, AUSTRALIA — Exposure to the smoke from wildfires that hit the southeast region of Australia in December 2006 and January 2007, specifically to particulate matter at high PM2.5 concentrations, was associated with an upswing in out-of-hospital cardiac arrests in men and ischemic heart disease (IHD) events in women[1]. The findings are from a study published July 15, 2015 in the Journal of the American Heart Association

Griffin

Excellent post and very good point on the lack of coverage Robert.
As you know, the silence extends well beyond lack of fire coverage. So little attention is paid by the media as to what is happening with extreme weather events. I am left shaking my head on a daily basis. Just this week, massive flash flooding devastated parts of the heartland. Kentucky, West Virginia, Indiana etc. There were houses destroyed and lives lost. The rainfall rates were nothing close to normal, but still coverage is largely limited to the local level. I really don’t have words for it, but it’s kinda freaky. I know that there are reporters out there that read your blog. They can do the research, follow your links to check the data. They must want to tell the story.Yet somehow the articles all seem to be watered down by the time they go to print. Something is really not right with this.
Perhaps someone could shed some light on the reasons why. It has to be more than sheer ignorance.

Weir Bohnd

Absolutely. The private, special interest based news media has become basically useless on the issue of climate change. And the same money goes to deleterious advertising, which also has an influence on the media not directly owned by special interest players. Take a look at the recent ridiculous resurfacing of the ‘Ice age is coming’ misinformation.

The source was a non peer reviewed report from a physicist know to take money from the fossil fuel industry. A couple of papers, like the Daily Mail, picked it up and reported on it with practically zero analysis. Media and social media parroting took hold and now you have this ridiculous meme circulating. Apparently none of these sources actually looked at the science which clearly shows that even a severe solar minimum would create a paltry forcing when compared even to the current buildup of greenhouse gasses.

Leland Palmer

I’d go further. It’s a covertly mostly controlled news media, in my opinion. The Eastern financial establishment decided on a course of going ahead with the fossil fuel economy, and set the news machinery in place to keep the public docile, even while their climate heritage was being stolen for the benefit of a few dynasties of the Super Rich. It’s all part of the rise of disaster capitalism, as defined by Naomi Klein.

I have no proof that this is the case, but I believe it to be true. The language is too systematically subtle, too deliberately obtuse, to be anything but entirely deliberate for the largest news outlets. I think a few big news sources are controlled, a few flagship newspapers and media outlets set the tone, and the media herd mentality and profit motives do the rest. Media consolidation means that there are fewer big sources to control, these days.

It’s deliberate. Our financial establishment wants the Arctic sea ice to melt, so they can drill for oil and play military dominance games with the Russians there.

From Scott Borgerson, then a David Rockefeller Visiting Fellow at the Rockefeller Brothers Fund financed Council on Foreign Relations, originally published in Foreign Affairs, the official magazine of the CFR:

“Ironically, the great melt is likely to yield more of the very commodities
that precipitated it: fossil fuels. As oil prices exceed $100 a
barrel, geologists are scrambling to determine exactly how much oil
and gas lies beneath the melting icecap. More is known about the
surface of Mars than about the Arctic Ocean’s deep, but early returns
indicate that the Arctic could hold the last remaining undiscovered
hydrocarbon resources on earth. The U.S.
Geological Survey and the Norwegian company
StatoilHydro estimate that the Arctic
holds as much as one-quarter of the world’s
remaining undiscovered oil and gas deposits.”

No, the great melt is not ironic. It’s deliberate and tragic. Borgerson waxed poetic about the financial wonders of a melting Arctic to numerous media outlets including CBS, major flagship newspapers, testified before Congress, and participated in a Senate Round
Table with then Senator John Kerry.

This is how the Rockefeller financed CFR influences decision makers to set policies beneficial to the Rockefeller controlled ExxonMobil and the historically Rockefeller dominated JPMorgan Chase, not to mention the historically Rockefeller dominated defense industry, which will benefit from an arms buildup in the Arctic.

This is all my opinion, but in my opinion it all makes a very ugly pattern. And, we all know that there is something terribly wrong with how the corporate media is reporting on global warming.

I wouldn’t describe your view as simply “opinion”. While we may not have a smoking gun memo directing news agencies to not discuss climate change or other disturbing trends, it is very clear to those who pay attention that the media is just another corporation benefitting from our current system, and depends on advertisers who also benefit from business as usual, and raising awareness among the ignorant public/consumers might rock the boat. Keep everyone brainwashed and docile and thinking that everything is fine. If everyone knew what Robert’s readers know, change would be demanded.

Leland Palmer

Yes, we’re severely risking the biological heritage of a couple of billion years of evolution, for short term profit of a tiny minority. CO2 concentration is a trigger mechanism in the atmosphere, with total cumulative greenhouse heating tens of thousands of times the heat produced as useful heat of combustion of fossil fuels, as you know. A greater nuisance cannot be imagined, and the victims of this climate vandalism cannot even sue for damages.

These idiots are about to set off a methane catastrophe and kill us all, I think.

Point, at this writing there must be many, many, thousands of ‘pizza’ ovens fired up belching heat and GHG into the atmosphere.
Millions of FF cars will traverse miles of asphalt to get to these round, fat and carbohydrate laden, items.
Keep in mind too that we have an extreme overabundance of ‘cheese’ which is the result of many nonfat, low fat, dairy products.
Probably plenty of GMO wheat for the dough too.
And always a quart, or two, of carbon-ated sugar liquids like Pepsi, Coca Cola, etc. — they may even be the parent company of the strip mall ‘pizza’ joint.

james cole

The media is deliberately pushing this news into the ‘not fit to print’ bin. Only local stations and papers ,where the fires are, actually have to cover the stories. CNN is a terrible joke, so too MSNBC & FOX. As hard as it is to believe, most Americans get their media news from these three cable outlets!
Here in N.E. Minnesota, we have been in and out of the Canadian smoke plumes. On a bad day, it is almost equal too the worst air possible to imagine. We had an inversion three days ago that drove smoke down to ground level, and we could smell the smoke, and particulate levels prompted strong health warnings. A glimpse of our future?
The Arctic seems to be a ticking carbon time bomb with it’s fuse well lit.
On another note, I too appreciate that this blog’s comments are reserved for real discussion of global warming and climate science. The idiot deniers, and professional posters of denial never make it into print, as well it should be. If they present an argument grounded in science, then it’s worth considering. But they don’t have any, do they!

Excellent post, thank you for this, I was not at all aware of any fires raging, or of the massive extent they are. Yeah the permafrost is thawing and it is part of a deadly recipe for global warming. Keep up the good work, 12 million acres burning is no joke, it should be front page news!

climatehawk1

Matt

Here in Australia, i have not seen 1 report of the fires! The ones in China and Russia i can understand because as Australians we don’t care about them (we are such a non-racist lot here…not). But Alaska / Canada…. we get front page news if Mrs Smith’s dog plays a piano in a New York! But virtually no mention of Hurricane Sandy, the mass mortality events (starfish, seals etc) in the NW Pacific, drought in California and the list goes on. You actually would have to go hunting for the news if you wanted any! And don’t get me started on the lack of coverage of Pakistan and India’s heatwave…… AAAAARRRRRRRRRRRRGGGGHHHHHH!!

Don’t feel bad, here in the US these things don’t make the news either. If it does make the news it is followed by a reassuring comment about how this is normal. As a result, the majority of the public is totally unaware that the biosphere is crumbling around them.

This is what happens when a single interest controls much of the media in a given country. There is a severely deleterious impact on the ability of the public to remain informed. Murdoch’s alignment with fossil fuels is hampering your ability to gain access to news relevant to climate change at the global level. I’d say that your country loses a good deal of resiliency as a result. Not to mention the fact that this level of information dominance is corrosive to a democratic governing system and promotes worsening forms of authoritarianism.

The best thing we could do is break these monopolies into tiny little pieces. We let the continue to exist and the impacts just get worse and worse.

Matt

“Not to mention the fact that this level of information dominance is corrosive to a democratic governing system and promotes worsening forms of authoritarianism.” That is exactly what is occuring in Australia at present! How quickly society forgets history and repeats the mistakes! Australia under the far right extremeism of Abbott and Co are taking the same first steps as Hilter did prior to WW2. God help us all down here if he gets in again. People here just don’t want to change, thay think that we can just go back to the 1960-70’s bury our heads in the sand and everything will be ok! WOW have we got some Karma pie to eat soon…….

The old white men wanted a Royal Commission (a truly big deal in a Commonwealth country) to prove the denialists right.

That rural group elect usually National Party (used to be called Country Party) members who are part of the governing coalition and whilst with Socialist tendancies are very conservative and very junior partners in Government.

Another timely and fantastic post, Robert! Not trying to be a pest, just thought you’d like to know…the first sentence in the second paragraph of “conditions in context”, I think you meant for the first word to be “the” instead of “there”.

Leland Palmer

NASA Worldview. Images can be zoomed and panned. Data sources can be added or subtracted using the Layers menu on the upper left. Past data can be seen using the time controls on the bottom of the screen. Red dots are thermal anomalies.

Question: Which is worse for global climate change? Methane gas going directly to the atmosphere from hydrates and permafrost; or methane seeping from the ground, being burned in wildfires, and then the smoke going in to the atmosphere? Or is it equally bad (not taking into account the damage to forests from the fires) ?

Both are terrible outcomes representing an amplifying feedback. There are so many fuels that if we keep pushing them to go off, it’s hothouse warming on top of hothouse warming. Best stop burning fossil fuels now and check the losses.

And then, separate from the above astroturfing and propaganda efforts, there appears to be a system of outright media control of major new outlets, in my opinion.

There are reports from various investigative sources of a past CIA operation, possibly called Operation Mockingbird, to allow direct CIA control of major flagship newspapers. According to some books this was set in place following WWII by Allen Dulles and Frank Wisner, and involved Phillip and Katherine Graham of the Washington Post.

There is a Wikipedia article on Mockingbird. My impression was that during the Bush era, something similar to Mockingbird was set in place again – just my opinion, of course. The New York Times and Washington Post climate coverage has been just too obtuse to be spontaneous, I think. Of course, their coverage of our aggressive military intervention in the Middle East also appears to be controlled.

Whatever the cause, there is something very, very wrong with our corporate media climate and global warming coverage, I believe. And, it’s not just the Fox Fantasy network that’s involved.

Leland Palmer

Corporate influence and active misinforming of the public is all over this one Leland. Mockingbird is historically unrelated to the climate change denial issue. It’s also gone — a relic of McCarthyism.

Leland Palmer

Hi Robert-
When Bush Sr. supposedly closed the Mockingbird network down, many years after McCarthy, he said that the CIA would continue to engage in cooperation with volunteer journalists.

This could be viewed as a pledge to continue to run the network – but pay the journalists through third parties.

That’s the impression I got – that Bush Jr. revived, expanded and privatized it, to facilitate aggressive military action in the Middle East. Just my opinion from watching the news. Information theory says that a message that is entirely predictable contains no information – by that standard, much of modern news coverage is information free, as would be expected of a mostly controlled Media.

The historical relationship between the CIA and the oil corporations is a very long and very tight one, as several third world politicians who tried to nationalize oil fields found out to their sorrow. The relationship between the CIA and our Eastern financial establishment, build on fossil fuels, is even tighter. It’s not that much of a stretch to think that some privatized remnant of Mockingbird could still exist, and could still be doing the oil corporations and the Eastern financial establishment favors, in my opinion.

Interesting. I wonder it an investigative blogger would be willing to take a crack at that egg. In any case, it would explain the information warfare psy-ops type tactics of the deniers. For my part, I try to avoid speculation on these kinds of matters eithout direct proof. That said, there has been a disturbing link between various Intel communities and what I have here termed — fossil fuel centric worldview. One of the reasons I left Army Intel, in fact. We had some think tank guy trying to talk about how essential Afghanistan was to pipeline routes out of Khazakstan and Uzbekistan. A bunch of mumbo jumbo about a new ‘great game’ surrounding central Asian oil in global politics. Looked like nothing more than a recipe for instability and conflict to me. This was in the 2000 timeframe.

Leland Palmer

Have you ever read Zbigniew Brzezinski’s 1996 book The Grand Chessboard? Honestly, I’ve only read part of it, myself. It’s main thesis seems to be that the empire that controls Central Asia will control the world. Brzezinski is reportedly David Rockefeller’s favorite foreign policy guru. Some people say that David Rockefeller created the Trilateral Commission so that Brzezinski could run it.

Anyway, that book might be one source of a lot of the “great game” talk about dominating Central Asia that your think tank guy was sprouting. It contains some chilling statements, like “Democracy is inimical to imperial mobilization”. It also exhaustively discusses stuff like pipelines out of Central Asian states and the geopolitics of Central Asian “resources”.

To get back to global warming- I seriously think that our financial elites want the Arctic sea ice to melt in the late summer so that they can gain access to Arctic fossil fuel resources. Media obtuseness in reporting on global warming is a deliberate part of that goal, I think. That’s what Borgerson’s Council on Foreign Relations articles seems to indicate. This could of course ignite the ice albedo positive feedback and ultimately result in a methane catastrophe. I get the idea that this objective – melting the Arctic sea ice during the late summer – is part of an overall elite plan for dominating the world in the 21st century. There is even talk of a “fabulous methane age” in which the world economy is fueled by methane from the methane hydrates. Unfortunately, I don’t think methane based abrupt climate change was part of that calculation – a miscalculation that could seriously degrade or even kill the biosphere, I think.

MM

About “allowing climate change”.
Maybe someone should come up with “golf courses in scottland will run out of water in 2020” then action will be taken for sure.
I bet that even these folks are pretty unsure what the consequences of an ice free arctic are and I hope that they do not want climate change to spin out of control. The only question is: when is “out of control” reached? That has been THE issue in climate change debate and for this I thank robertscribbler for shoiwing that “out of controll” is nigh and unpleasant.